


Tin Plate Heart

by MiniNephthys



Category: 1bitHeart (Video Game), Uncommon Time (Video Game)
Genre: Crossover, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 09:44:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4824200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiniNephthys/pseuds/MiniNephthys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The World Tuning patch crashes the Master Program.  That's bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tin Plate Heart

**Author's Note:**

> This is not the crossover I intended to write originally. I may still write that crossover. But in the meantime, here's this one.

Nanase doesn’t always pay close attention to patches for the Master Program. If it’s not something he’s in charge of, he usually trusts that whoever’s been assigned to work on it will have things under control. He’ll assist if he’s asked, but otherwise he tries to keep his hands out of other people’s code.

He first realizes that something has gone terribly wrong when his BitPhone crashes and will not restart.

Phones that run off your brainwaves should not stop working. They don’t need to be charged and their basic infrastructure is very simple. To take a BitPhone down completely would require some immensely difficult, near impossible hacking, or someone screwing up somewhere major.

He checks his memory. Someone was working on a security patch to the Master Program. The World Tuning patch was its codename, wasn’t it? The creator had always been fond of musical terminology.

Just sticking his head outside is enough to tell Nanase that he’s not the only one suffering this issue: it seems that every single BitPhone in the country has gone down. Anything that requires a computer of any kind has therefore ceased to function properly. Anything with an exchange of money will require paper, and hardly anyone keeps paper money any longer. Anything involving communication more advanced than a letter is impossible.

The Master Program should normally restore itself to previous settings if something like this happens. Obviously, it’s not doing that for some reason.

Nanase sighs, laments the high score on the game he was playing, and makes some slapdash plans.

If she was working on the patch at the local government headquarters, the creator would probably still be at headquarters. If not, then they might know what direction to point him in. Nanase lives in walking distance and doesn’t have to deal with the lack of buses or the streets crowded with the cars of panicking citizens.

The creator is not at headquarters, but one of the employees responsible for communicating with her tells him which hotel he’s in, and he walks there, despite how tiring the trek becomes. He has a job to do, he reminds himself, catching his breath before asking the clerk for his coworker’s room number.

The clerk isn’t sure, predictably, and can’t look it up without her ID letting her in the computer system. Nanase asks if she can send calls to the rooms, and the clerk points out how annoying it would be to every other guest.

“It’s really kind of important,” he says. “She crashed the Master Program.”

The clerk makes the calls. After the fifth, she says, “She’ll be down in a minute.”

Contralto Cantabile has a kind of tiredness in her eyes that Nanase wouldn’t expect at eighteen, even under the circumstances. She’s accompanied by Teagan Almace, who looks more ticked off than anything.

“Hi,” he says. “You prefer Alto, right?”

Alto nods. “Sorry, but I don’t know if we’ve met?”

“I’m Nanase. I worked on the original Master Program, we talked a couple times.”

“Aaah.” Alto looks away. “Look, I know I screwed up, and I’m sorry-“

“I’m not here to yell at you,” he says, interrupting.

“Why not?” asks Teagan in the background. “She put the whole country in a panic-”

Nanase shoots her an annoyed look for a moment before turning back to Alto. “Whatever happened happened and I don’t have a time machine on me right now, so the only thing we can do is fix it. We can point fingers later if we want, but right now we’ve got to focus on getting it back online, okay?”

“Mm. Right now I have two problems before we even start finding what went wrong,” says Alto. Nanase gets the impression this is ‘business mode’. “I can’t log in to edit the program without my ID.”

“I can fix that,” says Nanase brightly. “That’s easy hacking.”

Alto relaxes a tiny fraction. “Two, I was working with four other people. I’ve still got Teagan here, but the others were helping me long-distance. Without communication networks up, I’d have to go solo, and I don’t understand some of the parts they wrote.”

“That is a problem…” Nanase thinks. “How long distance?”

“They’re all on the island, but pretty far away,” Alto replies.

“That’s doable. Also, do you know how to fly a plane or a helicopter?”

Alto and Teagan stare at him for a second.

“The streets are way too packed,” he says with a shrug. “Even if we could send them letters they’d have a hard time getting here. Go by air, it’s easier.”

“All the flights are down because of the computers,” says Teagan, arms folded. “There’s no way you’d be able to book a flight.”

“We won’t go by commercial airline!” Nanase says, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “It’ll be fun, trust me!”

Teagan grumbles something. Alto is starting to brighten up.

None of them know how to fly a helicopter, but Nanase knows Toukai Mikoto, and Toukai reluctantly points them to someone willing to help on the grounds that he absolutely does not get Misane involved. Nanase is slightly disappointed, but still: helicopter. Super cool.

Teagan spends the first part trip complaining about Alto’s screw-ups and Alto’s mistakes and Alto’s this and that.

“Hey, Alto,” says Nanase, trying to ignore her, “can we push her out the window?”

Alto shakes her head. “She’s kind of always like this…”

“Can we leave her at home?” says Nanase. “Is she really that helpful?”

“I can hear you just fine,” says Teagan.

“Mm, maybe not, but I think I wouldn’t want to do the patch without her help,” says Alto, thoughtfully.

Nanase’s frown intensifies. “Can I tell her she’s being a big jerk and she needs to shut up?”

“Sure,” says Alto.

Nanase turns to Teagan on the other side of him. “Shut up, you’re not helping. I can’t push you out of the helicopter or kick you off the project team, but I can be just as annoying as you can, okay?”

Teagan looks at him skeptically.

Nanase chooses to interpret that as ‘go on and try’. He does a bit of prodding her data: his natural abilities still work fine. “You haaave five siblings, and you’re fighting with pretty much all of them, and right now you’re thinking ‘but that isn’t my fault, you-’”

“I don’t know how you’re doing this but you need to stop,” says Teagan, with a glare that might intimidate someone with any self-preservation.

“You need to stop being a jerk or I’ll do it the whole trip,” says Nanase.

“Fine,” says Teagan, before Alto can intervene. She sulks in silence the rest of the way.

They pick up Aubrey first, because they’re closest, and not because they’re Alto’s significant other. They introduce themself to Nanase first, and then squeak when Alto hugs them.

“They haven’t gotten to see each other in person much,” says Teagan, still grumpy.

“They’re cute!” says Nanase. Aubrey turns even more red at the words.

The helicopter is a bit more crowded with four in the backseat, but at least Teagan keeps quiet.

“...It feels a bit awkward,” says Aubrey.

“It’s nothing,” says Alto. “We just had a bit of a fight.”

“We’re completely fine!” says Nanase. “Anyway, aren’t helicopter rides fun?”

Meirin and Saki live together. Meirin nearly tackles Alto when she spots her; Saki is a bit more restrained, but still seems glad to see her.

They boot Teagan to copilot seat to make room in the helicopter.

“Now that the crew is assembled,” says Nanase, “you should probably start figuring out how to fix things.”

“You’re not going to help?” asks Aubrey.

“I’ll get you access to the program,” he replies. “But it’s a bunch of code I had nothing to do with, and I’m not a great debugger in the first place. I’m sure it’ll go faster if you all work on it.”

“We did kind of screw it up in the first place,” says Meirin. “Just a little tiny bit.”

“Everybody messes up,” says Nanase. “Doesn’t mean you can’t fix it.”

“...I’ll give it my best try,” says Saki. “But what if we can’t fix things?”

Nanase opens his mouth to speak, but Alto interrupts him. “Then we’ll think of some other way to get things back together. This is our mess, so we need to clean up after ourselves.”

They reconvene at the headquarters where Nanase usually works. As promised, he gets Alto back into the system, then steps away. “This part’s up to you. But I can get you coffee and donuts for while you’re working!”

Alto’s face lights up. “Coffee would be great!”

“We’re trying to focus here,” says Teagan.

“Coffee is delicious,” says Nanase. “It’s an important programming tool.”

He gets them snacks every now and then and checks up on their progress. The code is a jumbled mass even he can only half make sense of: the programmers start by arguing, then end up in an animated discussion over how to rewrite the thing. It seems they’re planning to work mostly from scratch.

They work. They work for three days, only stopping to eat and sleep. The Master Program is a massive pile of code and checking through the entire thing for bugs naturally takes time, but the employees at headquarters are starting to get nervous, and Nanase spends part of his time reassuring them: relax! Everything’s under control! The Master Program will be as good as new, better even!

“We’re compiling it,” Alto says. The nervous energy in the room is thick enough to feel.

Nanase taps his feet, drums his fingers, and then-

His BitPhone turns back on.

Meirin cheers and hugs Saki. Aubrey smiles, near tears until Alto smooches her. Teagan looks annoyed, probably at the smooching.

Nanase sighs heavily. “Now that that’s over with, I’m going back to my apartment, I’ve been way too far away for a shut-in.”


End file.
